LOS ANGELES (AP) — Testing a re-election theme, President Barack Obama is telling donors during a fundraising rich tour of three western states that the country is suffering from an economic crisis and from a political crisis. “People are crying out for action,” he says.

Pointing to elements of his $447 billion jobs plan rejected by Republican lawmakers, Obama said they would likely linger as campaign issues in 2012.

“This is the fight that we’re going to have right now, and I suspect this is the fight that we’re going to have to have over the next year,” Obama told about 240 donors at a fundraising event Monday at the Bellagio hotel and casino in Las Vegas. “The Republicans in Congress and the Republican candidates for president have made their agenda very clear.”

In Los Angeles on Monday evening, Obama mingled with Hollywood’s royalty. At an intimate dinner with top donors in the Hancock Park home of producer James Lassiter, Obama chatted with movie star Will Smith and former Los Angeles Lakers standout Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

“Sometimes I think people forget how much has gotten done,” Obama said, and he urged his supporters to rally once again, at the same time joking, as he often does, that he is older and grayer now. “This election won’t be as sexy as the first one.”

The Las Vegas fundraiser attracted about 240 people who paid from $1,000 to $35,800 toward Obama’s re-election campaign and to the Democratic National Committee. The bigger donors met the president personally.

The dinner at the Lassiter home was cozier, with fewer than 40 donors who paid $35,800 each. Among the sponsors were Troy Carter, the manager of Grammy award winner Lady Gaga. The singer herself was a guest at a fundraiser last month at the Atherton, Calif., home of Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Obama was to raise money at the home of movie stars Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas, an event aimed at Latino donors that was also expected to feature actress Eva Longoria and mayors Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles and Julian Castro of San Antonio.

While in Las Vegas, Obama spelled out a plan to help homeowners refinance their homes even if their home values had dropped dramatically below what they owed on their mortgages. Obama ventured into a working class development in the Las Vegas suburbs that benefitted from a community revitalization program like one he is pushing Congress to approve now.

But the president displayed campaign-style vigor, wading into the neighborhood crowd to shake hands and even lift a baby. His handlers reminded him it was time to leave, but Obama strode to yet another group of residents for one last hand shake, autograph and photograph.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Obama headed to a diverse neighborhood near Lassiter’s home south of Hollywood and stopped at Roscoe’s, a chicken restaurant, where he greeted customers and ordered chicken wings for his staff.

Most of his remaining time during this three-day swing through Nevada, California and Colorado is being spent raising money. On Tuesday he will tape an appearance on “The Tonight show with Jay Leno,” his second as president and fourth appearance overall. He will also attend fundraisers in San Francisco and Denver.

Why is the country suffering from a political crisis and an economic crisis three years into the Obama presidency? Why is it that three years into the Obama’s regime the people are crying out for action?

“Yesterday, President Barack Obama announced his plans to run for reelection in 2012, 582 days before Election Day and before most major Republican opponents officially announced that they’d be entering the race. This is the earliest any incumbent president has officially signed up to run again.”

The day that he announced, he himself ended his ability to move things legislatively. He went into full-time candidate mode and every single thing he is doing is merely another campaign tactic.

You add up all his golf, and he isn’t doing much else BUT campaign. Particularly given the fact that most of the crap the man is doing is nothing but incredibly poorly disguised campaigning (which he’s cynically making taxpayers pay for). From CNN:

But at times, the event also took on a touch of the political rally Obama’s political opponents said it was.

“I’m not just here to enjoy the nice weather, I’m here to enlist you in a fight,” he said to the cheering Cannon Falls crowd.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus derided the event — the first stop on Obama’s three-state trip — as nothing more than a campaign event disguised as a public one.

“He’s spending taxpayers’ dollars on a bus tour disguised as some kind of economic event for the country when we all know that it’s a campaign event paid for by the taxpayers,” he said.

Earlier, the Republican National Committee issued a “briefing book” on the trip made to resemble one produced by the administration in which it mockingly described the trip as “a totally non-political taxpayer-funded administration event that just happens to criss-cross several battleground states critical to the president’s reelection.”

Add to that the fact that this Marxist-in-Chief has been out hypocritically playing communist class warfare in public even as he has been sucking up to the filthy rich – oh, about every three days or so – in private.

That’s a much more concise statement of a certain economic and political philosophy than Obama’s “I just want you to be clear – it’s not that I want to punish your success – I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you – that they’ve got a chance at success too…. And I do believe for folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who’s things are slow and she can barely make the rent… “My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody… I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

And it’s similarly a lot more concise than his recent statement: “And I do not want, and I will not accept, a deal in which I am asked to do nothing, in fact, I’m able to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income that I don’t need, while a parent out there who is struggling to figure out how to send their kid to college suddenly finds that they’ve got a couple thousand dollars less in grants or student loans.”

But it’s the same exact stuff and it comes from the same exact source.

The running argument over extending the Bush tax cuts may come to nothing if Congress decides to go home in just three weeks, but it has been a revealing exchange nonetheless. The president’s call for extending the cuts for middle class taxpayers is an acknowledgment that President Bush did not just cut taxes for the rich as Democrats are fond of claiming. He cut them for all taxpayers.

Administration officials keep saying it’s a bad idea to keep the cuts in place for wealthier taxpayers because it would cost $700 billion in lost revenue over 10 years. What they don’t say is that keeping them for the middle class which they now support would cost about three times that much.

Still, the president’s position means he agrees with Republicans that raising people’s taxes in the midst of a flagging economy is a bad idea. But the very language used in discussing these issues tells you something as well. In Washington, letting people keep more of their own money is considered a cost. As if all the money really belongs to the government in the first place in which what you get to keep is an expenditure.

This sense of the primacy of government is reflected in the high percentage of stimulus funds used to bail out broke localities and protect the jobs of government workers. Democrats are proving once again that they are indeed the party of government. Americans think government is important, too. They just don’t think financing it takes priority over all else — Bret.

Not only are Democrats greedy – which they routinely accuse the rich of being for wanting to keep money that DEMOCRATS want to take away – but they are thieves, too. They are greedy, dishonest Marxist bureaucrats who want to take what is not theirs and piss it away on self-serving pet boondoggles that will benefit them politically. A different way of putting it is that they want to seize resources from the job creators and piss it away. They want to take money away from job creators who would invest in the private economy and use that money to purchase votes for their political campaigns.

[Update]: I hadn’t even published this article (I actually wrote it to this point on the 17th), and I already just received some powerful support for my main point. Steve Wynn – who has described himself as a “Democrat businessman” who supported Harry Reid’s reelection campaign and who has a liberal activist for a wife – had this to say about Barack Obama and his policies:

And I’m saying it bluntly that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next three hours giving you examples of all of us in this marketplace that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our health care costs escalate. Regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, you know — that keeps using that word redistribution.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe’s ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, they’re holding too much money. You know, we haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists.

“Pure socialism,” for what it’s worth, is “communism.”

The shoe fits. So let’s put it on their feet (i.e. like “concrete shoes”).

Unless the American people want communism, they should reject Barack Hussein Obama and they should abandon the Democrat Party.